System and method for disambiguating non-unique identifiers using information obtained from disparate communication channels

ABSTRACT

The disclosure describes systems and methods for disambiguating a non-unique identifiers of real world entities (RWEs) detected by a computing network by dynamically identifying relationships between RWEs known to the network. The relationships are determined based on social, spatial, temporal and logical information known about the RWEs based on the RWEs previous interactions with the network. These relationships are then used to generate a probability for each RWE that the non-unique identifier identifies that RWE. Based on the probabilities an RWE is selected and the proper network identifier may be used in place of the non-unique identifier.

CROSS REFERENCE TO RELATED APPLICATIONS

This application is a continuation of, and claims priority from co-pending U.S. patent application Ser. No. 11/958,157, filed on Dec. 17, 2007, entitled SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR DISAMBIGUATING NON-UNIQUE IDENTIFIERS USING INFORMATION OBTAINED FROM DISPARATE COMMUNICATION CHANNELS, which is incorporated herein by reference.

BACKGROUND

A great deal of information is generated when people use electronic devices, such as when people use mobile phones and cable set-top boxes. Such information, such as location, applications used, social network, physical and online locations visited, to name a few, could be used to deliver useful services and information to end users, and provide commercial opportunities to advertisers and retailers. However, most of this information is effectively abandoned due to deficiencies in the way such information may be captured. For example, and with respect to a mobile phone, information is generally not gathered while the mobile phone is idle (i.e., not being used by a user). Other information, such as presence of others in the immediate vicinity, time and frequency of messages to other users, and activities of a user's social network are also not captured effectively.

SUMMARY

This disclosure describes systems and methods for using data collected and stored by multiple devices on a network in order to improve the performance of the services provided via the network. In particular, the disclosure describes systems and methods for disambiguating a non-unique identifiers of real world entities (RWEs) detected by a computing network by dynamically identifying relationships between RWEs known to the network. The relationships are determined based on social, spatial, temporal and logical information known about the RWEs based on the RWEs previous interactions with the network. These relationships are then used to generate a probability for each RWE that the non-unique identifier identifies that RWE. Based on the probabilities an RWE is selected and the proper network identifier may be used in place of the non-unique identifier.

One aspect of the disclosure describes a method for disambiguating a non-unique username associated with an IO that is associated with a first RWE. The method includes determining that the non-unique username contains insufficient information to identify the first RWE and retrieving data associated with the IO from a data store. A probability is generated for each of a plurality of RWEs including the first RWE based on the data associated with the IO and data associated with the RWEs. The method then selects, based on the generated probabilities, the first RWE as the RWE identified by the non-unique username and may then automatically revise the data associated with the IO to include a unique identifier associated with the first RWE.

In another aspect, the disclosure describes a method for identifying an RWE associated with an IO. The method includes retrieving IO data associated with the TO, in which the IO data includes at least one of social data, spatial data, temporal data and logical data and also retrieving RWE data for each of a plurality of RWEs, in which the RWE data includes at least one of social data, spatial data, temporal data and logical data. The method then compares the RWE data and IO data and generates a probability for each of the plurality of RWEs based on results of the comparison. The method then selects, based on the generated probabilities, at least one first RWE as the RWE associated with the IO and may automatically revise the data associated with the IO to include a unique identifier associated with the at least one first RWE.

In another aspect, the disclosure describes a system that disambiguates non-unique entity identifiers. The system is embodied in one or more computing devices that include a correlation engine, computer-readable media, and a disambiguation engine. The correlation engine is connected via at least one communication network to a plurality of computing devices transmitting information objects (IOs) over the at least one communication network. The computer-readable media is connected to the correlation engine and stores at least one of social data, spatial data, temporal data and logical data associated with a plurality of real-world entities (RWEs). The correlation engine, based on the detection of a first IO containing a non-unique entity identifier, identifies one or more relationships between the first IO and the plurality of RWEs using the stored social data, spatial data, temporal data and logical data associated with a plurality of real-world entities (RWEs). The disambiguation engine generates a probability for each of the plurality of RWEs based on the identified relationships, selects one of the plurality of RWEs as being identified by the non-unique entity identifier based on the probabilities generated, and associates the first IO with the selected one of the plurality of RWEs via associating a unique network identifier for the selected one of the plurality of RWEs with the first IO.

In yet another aspect, the disclosure describes a computer-readable medium encoding instructions for performing a method for disambiguating a non-unique identifier. The method includes dynamically identifying relationships between physical entities known to a communication network in response to a first receipt, from a first source, of a first non-unique identifier and based on the identified relationships between the first source, a first physical entity and a second physical entity, using a first unique network identifier associated with the first physical entity in place of the first non-unique identifier. The method may further include, in response to a second receipt, from a second source, of the first non-unique identifier, using a second unique network identifier associated with a second physical entity in place of the first non-unique identifier based on the identified relationships between the second source, the first physical entity and the second physical entity.

These and various other features as well as advantages will be apparent from a reading of the following detailed description and a review of the associated drawings. Additional features are set forth in the description that follows and, in part, will be apparent from the description, or may be learned by practice of the described embodiments. The benefits and features will be realized and attained by the structure particularly pointed out in the written description and claims hereof as well as the appended drawings.

It is to be understood that both the foregoing general description and the following detailed description are exemplary and explanatory and are intended to provide further explanation of the invention as claimed.

BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE DRAWINGS

The following drawing figures, which form a part of this application, are illustrative of embodiments systems and methods described below and are not meant to limit the scope of the disclosure in any manner, which scope shall be based on the claims appended hereto.

FIG. 1 illustrates an example of the relationships between RWEs and IOs on the W4 COMN.

FIG. 2 illustrates an example of metadata defining the relationships between RWEs and IOs on the W4 COMN.

FIG. 3 illustrates a conceptual model of the W4 COMN.

FIG. 4 illustrates the functional layers of the W4 COMN architecture.

FIG. 5 illustrates an embodiment of analysis components of a W4 engine as shown in FIG. 2.

FIG. 6 illustrates an embodiment of a W4 engine showing different components within the sub-engines described generally above with reference to FIG. 5.

FIG. 7 illustrates some of the elements in a W4 engine adapted to perform W4 disambiguation as described herein.

FIG. 8 illustrates an embodiment of a method for disambiguating data on a network using social, temporal, spatial and topical data for entities on the network.

FIG. 9 illustrates another embodiment of a method for disambiguating data in an information object using social, temporal, spatial and topical data for RWEs.

DETAILED DESCRIPTION

This disclosure describes a communication network, referred herein as the “W4 Communications Network” or W4 COMN, that uses information related to the “Who, What, When and Where” of interactions with the network to provide improved services to the network's users. The W4 COMN is a collection of users, devices and processes that foster both synchronous and asynchronous communications between users and their proxies. It includes an instrumented network of sensors providing data recognition and collection in real-world environments about any subject, location, user or combination thereof.

As a communication network, the W4 COMN handles the routing/addressing, scheduling, filtering, prioritization, replying, forwarding, storing, deleting, privacy, transacting, triggering of a new message, propagating changes, transcoding and linking. Furthermore, these actions can be performed on any communication channel accessible by the W4 COMN.

The W4 COMN uses a data modeling strategy for creating profiles for not only users and locations but also any device on the network and any kind of user-defined data with user-specified conditions from a rich set of possibilities. Using Social, Spatial, Temporal and Logical data available about a specific user, topic or logical data object, every entity known to the W4 COMN can be mapped and represented against all other known entities and data objects in order to create both a micro graph for every entity as well as a global graph that interrelates all known entities against each other and their attributed relations.

In order to describe the operation of the W4 COMN, two elements upon which the W4 COMN is built must first be introduced, real-world entities and information objects. These distinction are made in order to enable correlations to be made from which relationships between electronic/logical objects and real objects can be determined. A real-world entity (RWE) refers to a person, device, location, or other physical thing known to the W4 COMN. Each RWE known to the W4 COMN is assigned or otherwise provided with a unique W4 identification number that absolutely identifies the RWE within the W4 COMN.

RWEs may interact with the network directly or through proxies, which may themselves be RWEs. Examples of RWEs that interact directly with the W4 COMN include any device such as a sensor, motor, or other piece of hardware that connects to the W4 COMN in order to receive or transmit data or control signals. Because the W4 COMN can be adapted to use any and all types of data communication, the devices that may be RWEs include all devices that can serve as network nodes or generate, request and/or consume data in a networked environment or that can be controlled via the network. Such devices include any kind of “dumb” device purpose-designed to interact with a network (e.g., cell phones, cable television set top boxes, fax machines, telephones, and radio frequency identification (RFID) tags, sensors, etc.). Typically, such devices are primarily hardware and their operations can not be considered separately from the physical device.

Examples of RWEs that must use proxies to interact with W4 COMN network include all non-electronic entities including physical entities, such as people, locations (e.g., states, cities, houses, buildings, airports, roads, etc.) and things (e.g., animals, pets, livestock, gardens, physical objects, cars, airplanes, works of art, etc.), and intangible entities such as business entities, legal entities, groups of people or sports teams. In addition, “smart” devices (e.g., computing devices such as smart phones, smart set top boxes, smart cars that support communication with other devices or networks, laptop computers, personal computers, server computers, satellites, etc.) are also considered RWEs that must use proxies to interact with the network. Smart devices are electronic devices that can execute software via an internal processor in order to interact with a network. For smart devices, it is actually the executing software application(s) that interact with the W4 COMN and serve as the devices' proxies.

The W4 COMN allows associations between RWEs to be determined and tracked. For example, a given user (an RWE) may be associated with any number and type of other RWEs including other people, cell phones, smart credit cards, personal data assistants, email and other communication service accounts, networked computers, smart appliances, set top boxes and receivers for cable television and other media services, and any other networked device. This association may be made explicitly by the user, such as when the RWE is installed into the W4 COMM. An example of this is the set up of a new cell phone, cable television service or email account in which a user explicitly identifies an RWE (e.g., the user's phone for the cell phone service, the user's set top box and/or a location for cable service, or a username and password for the online service) as being directly associated with the user. This explicit association may include the user identifying a specific relationship between the user and the RWE (e.g., this is my device, this is my home appliance, this person is my friend/father/son/etc., this device is shared between me and other users, etc.). RWEs may also be implicitly associated with a user based on a current situation. For example, a weather sensor on the W4 COMN may be implicitly associated with a user based on information indicating that the user lives or is passing near the sensor's location.

An information object (IO), on the other hand, is a logical object that stores, maintains, generates, serves as a source for or otherwise provides data for use by RWEs and/or the W4 COMM. IOs are distinct from RWEs in that IOs represent data, whereas RWEs may create or consume data (often by creating or consuming IOs) during their interaction with the W4 COMN. Examples of IOs include passive objects such as communication signals (e.g., digital and analog telephone signals, streaming media and interprocess communications), email messages, transaction records, virtual cards, event records (e.g., a data file identifying a time, possibly in combination with one or more RWEs such as users and locations, that may further be associated with a known topic/activity/significance such as a concert, rally, meeting, sporting event, etc.), recordings of phone calls, calendar entries, web pages, database entries, electronic media objects (e.g., media files containing songs, videos, pictures, images, audio messages, phone calls, etc.), electronic files and associated metadata.

In addition, IOs include any executing process or application that consumes or generates data such as an email communication application (such as OUTLOOK by MICROSOFT, or YAHOO! MAIL by YAHOO!), a calendaring application, a word processing application, an image editing application, a media player application, a weather monitoring application, a browser application and a web page server application. Such active IOs may or may not serve as a proxy for one or more RWEs. For example, voice communication software on a smart phone may serve as the proxy for both the smart phone and for the owner of the smart phone.

An IO in the W4 COMN may be provided a unique W4 identification number that absolutely identifies the IO within the W4 COMN. Although data in an IO may be revised by the act of an RWE, the IO remains a passive, logical data representation or data source and, thus, is not an RWE.

For every IO there are at least three classes of associated RWEs. The first is the RWE who owns or controls the IO, whether as the creator or a rights holder (e.g., an RWE with editing rights or use rights to the IO). The second is the RWE(s) that the IO relates to, for example by containing information about the RWE or that identifies the RWE. The third are any RWEs who then pay any attention (directly or through a proxy process) to the IO, in which “paying attention” refers to accessing the IO in order to obtain data from the IO for some purpose.

“Available data” and “W4 data” means data that exists in an IO in some form somewhere or data that can be collected as needed from a known IO or RWE such as a deployed sensor. “Sensor” means any source of W4 data including PCs, phones, portable PCs or other wireless devices, household devices, cars, appliances, security scanners, video surveillance, RFID tags in clothes, products and locations, online data or any other source of information about a real-world user/topic/thing (RWE) or logic-based agent/process/topic/thing (IO).

FIG. 1 illustrates an example of the relationships between RWEs and IOs on the W4 COMM. In the embodiment illustrated, a user 102 is a RWE of the network provided with a unique network ID. The user 102 is a human that communicates with the network via the proxy devices 104, 106, 108, 110 associated with the user 102, all of which are RWEs of the network and provided with their own unique network ID. Some of these proxies may communicate directly with the W4 COMN or may communicate with the W4 COMN via IOs such as applications executed on or by the device.

As mentioned above the proxy devices 104, 106, 108, 110 may be explicitly associated with the user 102. For example, one device 104 may be a smart phone connected by a cellular service provider to the network and another device 106 may be a smart vehicle that is connected to the network. Other devices may be implicitly associated with the user 102. For example, one device 108 may be a “dumb” weather sensor at a location matching the current location of the user's cell phone 104, and thus implicitly associated with the user 102 while the two RWEs 104, 108 are co-located. Another implicitly associated device 110 may be a sensor 110 for physical location 112 known to the W4 COMN. The location 112 is known, either explicitly (through a user-designated relationship, e.g., this is my home, place of employment, parent, etc.) or implicitly (the user 102 is often co-located with the RWE 112 as evidenced by data from the sensor 110 at that location 112), to be associated with the first user 102.

The user 102 may also be directly associated with other people, such as the person 140 shown, and then indirectly associated with other people 142, 144 through their associations as shown. Again, such associations may be explicit (e.g., the user 102 may have identified the associated person 140 as his/her father, or may have identified the person 140 as a member of the user's social network) or implicit (e.g., they share the same address).

Tracking the associations between people (and other RWEs as well) allows the creation of the concept of “intimacy”: Intimacy being a measure of the degree of association between two people or RWEs. For example, each degree of removal between RWEs may be considered a lower level of intimacy, and assigned lower intimacy score. Intimacy may be based solely on explicit social data or may be expanded to include all W4 data including spatial data and temporal data.

Each RWE 102, 104, 106, 108, 110, 112, 140, 142, 144 of the W4 COMN may be associated with one or more IOs as shown. Continuing the examples discussed above, FIG. 1 illustrates two IOs 122, 124 as associated with the cell phone device 104. One IO 122 may be a passive data object such as an event record that is used by scheduling/calendaring software on the cell phone, a contact IO used by an address book application, a historical record of a transaction made using the device 104 or a copy of a message sent from the device 104. The other IO 124 may be an active software process or application that serves as the device's proxy to the W4 COMN by transmitting or receiving data via the W4 COMN. Voice communication software, scheduling/calendaring software, an address book application or a text messaging application are all examples of IOs that may communicate with other IOs and RWEs on the network. The IOs 122, 124 may be locally stored on the device 104 or stored remotely on some node or datastore accessible to the W4 COMN, such as a message server or cell phone service datacenter. The IO 126 associated with the vehicle 108 may be an electronic file containing the specifications and/or current status of the vehicle 108, such as make, model, identification number, current location, current speed, current condition, current owner, etc. The IO 128 associated with sensor 108 may identify the current state of the subject(s) monitored by the sensor 108, such as current weather or current traffic. The IO 130 associated with the cell phone 110 may be information in a database identifying recent calls or the amount of charges on the current bill.

Furthermore, those RWEs which can only interact with the W4 COMN through proxies, such as the people 102, 140, 142, 144, computing devices 104, 106 and location 112, may have one or more IOs 132, 134, 146, 148, 150 directly associated with them. An example includes IOs 132, 134 that contain contact and other RWE-specific information. For example, a person's IO 132, 146, 148, 150 may be a user profile containing email addresses, telephone numbers, physical addresses, user preferences, identification of devices and other RWEs associated with the user, records of the user's past interactions with other RWE's on the W4 COMN (e.g., transaction records, copies of messages, listings of time and location combinations recording the user's whereabouts in the past), the unique W4 COMN identifier for the location and/or any relationship information (e.g., explicit user-designations of the user's relationships with relatives, employers, co-workers, neighbors, service providers, etc.). Another example of a person's IO 132, 146, 148, 150 includes remote applications through which a person can communicate with the W4 COMN such as an account with a web-based email service such as Yahoo! Mail. The location's IO 134 may contain information such as the exact coordinates of the location, driving directions to the location, a classification of the location (residence, place of business, public, non-public, etc.), information about the services or products that can be obtained at the location, the unique W4 COMN identifier for the location, businesses located at the location, photographs of the location, etc.

In order to correlate RWEs and IOs to identify relationships, the W4 COMN makes extensive use of existing metadata and generates additional metadata where necessary. Metadata is loosely defined as data that describes data. For example, given an IO such as a music file, the core, primary or object data of the music file is the actual music data that is converted by a media player into audio that is heard by the listener. Metadata for the same music file may include data identifying the artist, song, etc., album art, and the format of the music data. This metadata may be stored as part of the music file or in one or more different IOs that are associated with the music file or both. In addition, W4 metadata for the same music file may include the owner of the music file and the rights the owner has in the music file. As another example, if the IO is a picture taken by an electronic camera, the picture may include in addition to the primary image data from which an image may be created on a display, metadata identifying when the picture was taken, where the camera was when the picture was taken, what camera took the picture, who, if anyone, is associated (e.g., designated as the camera's owner) with the camera, and who and what are the subjects of/in the picture. The W4 COMN uses all the available metadata in order to identify implicit and explicit associations between entities and data objects.

FIG. 2 illustrates an example of metadata defining the relationships between RWEs and IOs on the W4 COMN. In the embodiment shown, an IO 202 includes object data 204 and five discrete items of metadata 206, 208, 210, 212, 214. Some items of metadata 208, 210, 212 may contain information related only to the object data 204 and unrelated to any other IO or RWE. For example, a creation date, text or an image that is to be associated with the object data 204 of the IO 202.

Some of items of metadata 206, 214, on the other hand, may identify relationships between the IO 202 and other RWEs and IOs. As illustrated, the IO 202 is associated by one item of metadata 206 with an RWE 220 that RWE 220 is further associated with two IOs 224, 226 and a second RWE 222 based on some information known to the W4 COMN. This part of FIG. 2, for example, could describe the relations between a picture (IO 202) containing metadata 206 that identifies the electronic camera (the first RWE 220) and the user (the second RWE 224) that is known by the system to be the owner of the camera 220. Such ownership information may be determined, for example, from one or another of the IOs 224, 226 associated with the camera 220.

FIG. 2 also illustrates metadata 214 that associates the IO 202 with another IO 230. This IO 230 is itself associated with three other IOs 232, 234, 236 that are further associated with different RWEs 242, 244, 246. This part of FIG. 2, for example, could describe the relations between a music file (IO 202) containing metadata 206 that identifies the digital rights file (the first IO 230) that defines the scope of the rights of use associated with this music file 202. The other IOs 232, 234, 236 are other music files that are associated with the rights of use and which are currently associated with specific owners (RWEs 242, 244, 246).

FIG. 3 illustrates a conceptual model of the W4 COMN. The W4 COMN 300 creates an instrumented messaging infrastructure in the form of a global logical network cloud conceptually sub-divided into networked-clouds for each of the 4Ws: Who, Where, What and When. In the Who cloud 302 are all users whether acting as senders, receivers, data points or confirmation/certification sources as well as user proxies in the forms of user-program processes, devices, agents, calendars, etc. In the Where cloud 304 are all physical locations, events, sensors or other RWEs associated with a spatial reference point or location. The When cloud 306 is composed of natural temporal events (that is events that are not associated with particular location or person such as days, times, seasons) as well as collective user temporal events (holidays, anniversaries, elections, etc.) and user-defined temporal events (birthdays, smart-timing programs). The What cloud 308 is comprised of all known data—web or private, commercial or user-accessible to the W4 COMN, including for example environmental data like weather and news, RWE-generated data, IOs and IO data, user data, models, processes and applications. Thus, conceptually, most data is contained in the What cloud 308.

As this is just a conceptual model, it should be noted that some entities, sensors or data will naturally exist in multiple clouds either disparate in time or simultaneously. Additionally, some IOs and RWEs may be composites in that they combine elements from one or more clouds. Such composites may be classified or not as appropriate to facilitate the determination of associations between RWEs and IOs. For example, an event consisting of a location and time could be equally classified within the When cloud 306, the What cloud 308 and/or the Where cloud 304.

The W4 engine 310 is center of the W4 COMN's central intelligence for making all decisions in the W4 COMN. An “engine” as referred to herein is meant to describe a software, hardware or firmware (or combinations thereof) system, process or functionality that performs or facilitates the processes, features and/or functions described herein (with or without human interaction or augmentation). The W4 engine 310 controls all interactions between each layer of the W4 COMN and is responsible for executing any approved user or application objective enabled by W4 COMN operations or interoperating applications. In an embodiment, the W4 COMN is an open platform upon which anyone can write an application. To support this, it includes standard published APIs for requesting (among other things) synchronization, disambiguation, user or topic addressing, access rights, prioritization or other value-based ranking, smart scheduling, automation and topical, social, spatial or temporal alerts.

One function of the W4 COMN is to collect data concerning all communications and interactions conducted via the W4 COMN, which may include storing copies of IOs and information identifying all RWEs and other information related to the IOs (e.g., who, what, when, where information). Other data collected by the W4 COMN may include information about the status of any given RWE and IO at any given time, such as the location, operational state, monitored conditions (e.g., for an RWE that is a weather sensor, the current weather conditions being monitored or for an RWE that is a cell phone, its current location based on the cellular towers it is in contact with) and current status.

The W4 engine 310 is also responsible for identifying RWEs and relationships between RWEs and IOs from the data and communication streams passing through the W4 COMN. The function of identifying RWEs associated with or implicated by IOs and actions performed by other RWEs is referred to as entity extraction. Entity extraction includes both simple actions, such as identifying the sender and receivers of a particular IO, and more complicated analyses of the data collected by and/or available to the W4 COMN, for example determining that a message listed the time and location of an upcoming event and associating that event with the sender and receivers) of the message based on the context of the message or determining that an RWE is stuck in a traffic jam based on a correlation of the RWE's location with the status of a co-located traffic monitor.

It should be noted that when performing entity extraction from an IO, the IO can be an opaque object with only W4 metadata related to the object (e.g., date of creation, owner, recipient, transmitting and receiving RWEs, type of IO, etc.), but no knowledge of the internals of the IO (i.e., the actual primary or object data contained within the object). Knowing the content of the IO does not prevent W4 data about the IO (or RWE) to be gathered. The content of the IO if known can also be used in entity extraction, if available, but regardless of the data available entity extraction is performed by the network based on the available data. Likewise, W4 data extracted around the object can be used to imply attributes about the object itself, while in other embodiments, full access to the IO is possible and RWEs can thus also be extracted by analyzing the content of the object, e.g. strings within an email are extracted and associated as RWEs to for use in determining the relationships between the sender, user, topic or other RWE or IO impacted by the object or process.

In an embodiment, the W4 engine 310 represents a group of applications executing on one or more computing devices that are nodes of the W4 COMN. For the purposes of this disclosure, a computing device is a device that includes a processor and memory for storing data and executing software (e.g., applications) that perform the functions described. Computing devices may be provided with operating systems that allow the execution of software applications in order to manipulate data.

In the embodiment shown, the W4 engine 310 may be one or a group of distributed computing devices, such as a general-purpose personal computers (PCs) or purpose built server computers, connected to the W4 COMN by suitable communication hardware and/or software. Such computing devices may be a single device or a group of devices acting together. Computing devices may be provided with any number of program modules and data files stored in a local or remote mass storage device and local memory (e.g., RAM) of the computing device. For example, as mentioned above, a computing device may include an operating system suitable for controlling the operation of a networked computer, such as the WINDOWS XP or WINDOWS SERVER operating systems from MICROSOFT CORPORATION.

Some RWEs may also be computing devices such as smart phones, web-enabled appliances, PCs, laptop computers, and personal data assistants (PDAs). Computing devices may be connected to one or more communications networks such as the Internet, a publicly switched telephone network, a cellular telephone network, a satellite communication network, a wired communication network such as a cable television or private area network. Computing devices may be connected any such network via a wired data connection or wireless connection such as a wi-fi, a WiMAX (802.36), a Bluetooth or a cellular telephone connection.

Local data structures, including discrete IOs, may be stored on a mass storage device (not shown) that is connected to, or part of, any of the computing devices described herein including the W4 engine 310. For example, in an embodiment, the data backbone of the W4 COMN, discussed below, includes multiple mass storage devices that maintain the IOs, metadata and data necessary to determine relationships between RWEs and IOs as described herein. A mass storage device includes some form of computer-readable media and provides non-volatile storage of data and software for retrieval and later use by one or more computing devices. Although the description of computer-readable media contained herein refers to a mass storage device, such as a hard disk or CD-ROM drive, it should be appreciated by those skilled in the art that computer-readable media can be any available media that can be accessed by a computing device.

By way of example, and not limitation, computer-readable media may comprise computer storage media and communication media. Computer storage media include volatile and non-volatile, removable and non-removable media implemented in any method or technology for storage of information such as computer-readable instructions, data structures, program modules or other data. Computer storage media includes, but is not limited to, RAM, ROM, EPROM, EEPROM, flash memory or other solid state memory technology, CD-ROM, DVD, or other optical storage, magnetic cassette, magnetic tape, magnetic disk storage or other magnetic storage devices, or any other medium which can be used to store the desired information and which can be accessed by the computer.

FIG. 4 illustrates the functional layers of the W4 COMN architecture. At the lowest layer, referred to as the sensor layer 402, is the network 404 of the actual devices, users, nodes and other RWEs. The instrumentation of the network nodes to utilize them as sensors include known technologies like web analytics, GPS, cell-tower pings, use logs, credit card transactions, online purchases, explicit user profiles and implicit user profiling achieved through behavioral targeting, search analysis and other analytics models used to optimize specific network applications or functions.

The next layer is the data layer 406 in which the data produced by the sensor layer 402 is stored and cataloged. The data may be managed by either the network 404 of sensors or the network infrastructure 406 that is built on top of the instrumented network of users, devices, agents, locations, processes and sensors. The network infrastructure 408 is the core under-the-covers network infrastructure that includes the hardware and software necessary to receive that transmit data from the sensors, devices, etc. of the network 404. It further includes the processing and storage capability necessary to meaningfully categorize and track the data created by the network 404.

The next layer of the W4 COMN is the user profiling layer 410. This layer 410 may further be distributed between the network infrastructure 408 and user applications/processes 412 executing on the W4 engine or disparate user computing devices. The user profiling layer 410 performs the W4 COMN's user profiling functions. Personalization is enabled across any single or combination of communication channels and modes including email, IM, texting (SMS, etc.), photobloging, audio (e.g. telephone call), video (teleconferencing, live broadcast), games, data confidence processes, security, certification or any other W4 COMM process call for available data.

In one embodiment, the user profiling layer 410 is a logic-based layer above all sensors to which sensor data are sent in the rawest form to be mapped and placed into the W4 COMN data backbone 420. The data (collected and refined, related and deduplicated, synchronized and disambiguated) are then stored in one or a collection of related databases available to all processes of all applications approved on the W4 COMN. All Network-originating actions and communications are based upon the fields of the data backbone, and some of these actions are such that they themselves become records somewhere in the backbone, e.g. invoicing, while others, e.g. fraud detection, synchronization, disambiguation, can be done without an impact to profiles and models within the backbone.

Actions originating from anything other than the network, e.g., RWEs such as users, locations, proxies and processes, come from the applications layer 414 of the W4 COMN. Some applications may be developed by the W4 COMN operator and appear to be implemented as part of the communications infrastructure 408, e.g. email or calendar programs because of how closely they operate with the sensor processing and user profiling layer 410. The applications 412 also serve some role as a sensor in that they, through their actions, generate data back to the data layer 406 via the data backbone concerning any data created or available due to the applications execution.

The applications layer 414 also provides a personalized user interface (UI) based upon device, network, carrier as well as user-selected or security-based customizations. Any UI can operate within the W4 COMN if it is instrumented to provide data on user interactions or actions back to the network. This is a basic sensor function of any W4 COMN application/UI, and although the W4 COMN can interoperate with applications/UIs that are not instrumented, it is only in a delivery capacity and those applications/UIs would not be able to provide any data (let alone the rich data otherwise available from W4-enabled devices.)

In the case of W4 COMN mobile devices, the UI can also be used to confirm or disambiguate incomplete W4 data in real-time, as well as correlation, triangulation and synchronization sensors for other nearby enabled or non-enabled devices. At some point, the network effects of enough enabled devices allow the network to gather complete or nearly complete data (sufficient for profiling and tracking) of a non-enabled device because of its regular intersection and sensing by enabled devices in its real-world location.

Above the applications layer 414 (and sometimes hosted within it) is the communications delivery network(s) 416. This can be operated by the W4 COMN operator or be independent third-party carrier service, but in either case it functions to deliver the data via synchronous or asynchronous communication. In every case, the communication delivery network 414 will be sending or receiving data (e.g., http or IP packets) on behalf of a specific application or network infrastructure 408 request.

The communication delivery layer 418 also has elements that act as sensors including W4 entity extraction from phone calls, emails, blogs, etc. as well as specific user commands within the delivery network context, e.g., “save and prioritize this call” said before end of call may trigger a recording of the previous conversation to be saved and for the W4 entities within the conversation to analyzed and increased in weighting prioritization decisions in the personalization/user profiling layer 410.

FIG. 5 illustrates an embodiment of analysis components of a W4 engine as shown in FIG. 3. As discussed above, the W4 Engine is responsible for identifying RWEs and relationships between RWEs and IOs from the data and communication streams passing through the W4 COMN.

In one embodiment the W4 engine connects, interoperates and instruments all network participants through a series of sub-engines that perform different operations in the entity extraction process. One such sub-engine is an attribution engine 504. The attribution engine 504 tracks the real-world ownership, control, publishing or other conditional rights of any RWE in any IO. Whenever a new IO is detected by the W4 engine 502, e.g., through creation or transmission of a new message, a new transaction record, a new image file, etc., ownership is assigned to the IO. The attribution engine 504 creates this ownership information and further allows this information to be determined for each IO known to the W4 COMN.

The W4 engine 502 further includes a correlation engine 506. The correlation engine 506 operates in two capacities: first, to identify associated RWEs and IOs and their relationships (such as by creating a combined graph of any combination of RWEs and IOs and their attributes, relationships and reputations within contexts or situations) and second, as a sensor analytics pre-processor for attention events from any internal or external source.

In one embodiment, the identification of associated RWEs and IOs function of the correlation engine 506 is done by graphing the available data. In this embodiment, a histogram of all RWEs and IOs is created, from which correlations based on the graph may be made. Graphing, or the act of creating a histogram, is a computer science method of identifying a distribution of data in order to identify relevant information and make correlations between the data. In a more general mathematical sense, a histogram is simply a mapping m_(i) that counts the number of observations that fall into various disjoint categories (known as bins), whereas the graph of a histogram is merely one way to represent a histogram. By selecting each IO, RWE, and other known parameters (e.g., times, dates, locations, etc.) as different bins and mapping the available data, relationships between RWEs, IOs and the other parameters can be identified.

As a pre-processor, the correlation engine 506 monitors the information provided by RWEs in order to determine if any conditions are identified that may trigger an action on the part of the W4 engine 502. For example, if a delivery condition has been associated with a message, when the correlation engine 506 determines that the condition is met, it can transmit the appropriate trigger information to the W4 engine 502 that triggers delivery of the message.

The attention engine 508 instruments all appropriate network nodes, clouds, users, applications or any combination thereof and includes close interaction with both the correlation engine 506 and the attribution engine 504.

FIG. 6 illustrates an embodiment of a W4 engine showing different components within the sub-engines described generally above with reference to FIG. 4. In one embodiment the W4 engine 600 includes an attention engine 608, attribution engine 604 and correlation engine 606 with several sub-managers based upon basic function.

The attention engine 608 includes a message intake and generation manager 610 as well as a message delivery manager 612 that work closely with both a message matching manager 614 and a real-time communications manager 616 to deliver and instrument all communications across the W4 COMN.

The attribution engine 604 works within the user profile manager 618 and in conjunction with all other modules to identify, process/verify and represent ownership and rights information related to RWEs, IOs and combinations thereof.

The correlation engine 606 dumps data from both of its channels (sensors and processes) into the same data backbone 620 which is organized and controlled by the W4 analytics manager 622 and includes both aggregated and individualized archived versions of data from all network operations including user logs 624, attention rank place logs 626, web indices and environmental logs 618, e-commerce and financial transaction information 630, search indexes and logs 632, sponsor content or conditionals, ad copy and any and all other data used in any W4COMN process, IO or event. Because of the amount of data that the W4 COMN will potentially store, the data backbone 620 includes numerous database servers and datastores in communication with the W4 COMN to provide sufficient storage capacity.

As discussed above, the data collected by the W4 COMN includes spatial data, temporal data, RWE interaction data, IO content data (e.g., media data), and user data including explicitly-provided and deduced social and relationship data. Spatial data may be any data identifying a location associated with an RWE. For example, the spatial data may include any passively collected location data, such as cell tower data, global packet radio service (GPRS) data, global positioning service (GPS) data, WI-FI data, personal area network data, IP address data and data from other network access points, or actively collected location data, such as location data entered by the user.

Temporal data is time based data (e.g., time stamps) that relate to specific times and/or events associated with a user and/or the electronic device. For example, the temporal data may be passively collected time data (e.g., time data from a clock resident on the electronic device, or time data from a network clock), or the temporal data may be actively collected time data, such as time data entered by the user of the electronic device (e.g., a user maintained calendar).

The interaction data may be any data associated with user interaction of the electronic device, whether active or passive. Examples of interaction data include interpersonal communication data, media data, relationship data, transactional data and device interaction data, all of which are described in further detail below. Table 1, below, is a non-exhaustive list including examples of electronic data.

TABLE 1 Examples of Electronic Data Spatial Data Temporal Data Interaction Data Cell tower data Time stamps Interpersonal GPRS data Local clock communication data GPS data Network clock Media data WiFi data User input of Relationship data time data Personal area network data Transactional data Network access points data Device interaction data User input of location data Geo-coordinates data

With respect to the interaction data, communications between any RWEs may generate communication data that is transferred via the W4 COMN. For example, the communication data may be any data associated with an incoming or outgoing short message service (SMS) message, email message, voice call (e.g., a cell phone call, a voice over IP call), or other type of interpersonal communication relative to an RWE, such as information regarding who is sending and receiving the communication(s). As described above, communication data may be correlated with, for example, temporal data to deduce information regarding frequency of communications, including concentrated communication patterns, which may indicate user activity information.

Logical and IO data refers to the data contained by an IO as well as data associated with the IO such as creation time, owner, associated RWEs, when the IO was last accessed, etc. If the IO is a media object, the term media data may be used. Media data may include any data relating to presentable media, such as audio data, visual data, and audiovisual data. For example, the audio data may be data relating to downloaded music, such as genre, artist, album and the like, and includes data regarding ringtones, ringbacks, media purchased, playlists, and media shared, to name a few. The visual data may be data relating to images and/or text received by the electronic device (e.g., via the Internet or other network). The visual data may be data relating to images and/or text sent from and/or captured at the electronic device. The audiovisual data may be data associated with any videos captured at, downloaded to, or otherwise associated with the electronic device. The media data includes media presented to the user via a network, such as use of the Internet, and includes data relating to text entered and/or received by the user using the network (e.g., search terms), and interaction with the network media, such as click data (e.g., advertisement banner clicks, bookmarks, click patterns and the like). Thus, the media data may include data relating to the user's RSS feeds, subscriptions, group memberships, game services, alerts, and the like. The media data also includes non-network activity, such as image capture and/or video capture using an electronic device, such as a mobile phone. The image data may include metadata added by the user, or other data associated with the image, such as, with respect to photos, location when the photos were taken, direction of the shot, content of the shot, and time of day, to name a few. As described in further detail below, media data may be used, for example, to deduce activities information or preferences information, such as cultural and/or buying preferences information.

The relationship data may include data relating to the relationships of an RWE or IO to another RWE or IO. For example, the relationship data may include user identity data, such as gender, age, race, name, social security number, photographs and other information associated with the user's identity. User identity information may also include e-mail addresses, login names and passwords. Relationship data may further include data identifying explicitly associated RWEs. For example, relationship data for a cell phone may indicate the user that owns the cell phone and the company that provides the service to the phone. As another example, relationship data for a smart car may identify the owner, a credit card associated with the owner for payment of electronic tolls, those users permitted to drive the car and the service station for the car.

Relationship data may also include social network data. Social network data includes data relating to any relationship that is explicitly defined by a user or other RWE, such as data relating to a user's friends, family, co-workers, business relations, and the like. Social network data may include, for example, data corresponding with a user-maintained electronic address book. Relationship data may be correlated with, for example, location data to deduce social network information, such as primary relationships (e.g., user-spouse, user-children and user-parent relationships) or other relationships (e.g., user-friends, user-co-worker, user-business associate relationships). Relationship data also may be utilized to deduce, for example, activities information.

The interaction data may also include transactional data. The transactional data may be any data associated with commercial transactions undertaken by or at the mobile electronic device, such as vendor information, financial institution information (e.g., bank information), financial account information (e.g., credit card information), merchandise information and costs/prices information, and purchase frequency information, to name a few. The transactional data may be utilized, for example, to deduce activities and preferences information. The transactional information may also be used to deduce types of devices and/or services the user owns and/or in which the user may have an interest.

The interaction data may also include device or other RWE interaction data. Such data includes both data generated by interactions between a user and a RWE on the W4 COMN and interactions between the RWE and the W4 COMN. RWE interaction data may be any data relating to an RWE's interaction with the electronic device not included in any of the above categories, such as habitual patterns associated with use of an electronic device data of other modules/applications, such as data regarding which applications are used on an electronic device and how often and when those applications are used. As described in further detail below, device interaction data may be correlated with other data to deduce information regarding user activities and patterns associated therewith. Table 2, below, is a non-exhaustive list including examples of interaction data.

TABLE 2 Examples of Interaction Data Type of Data Example(s) Interpersonal Text-based communications, communication data such as SMS and e-mail Audio-based communications, such as voice calls, voice notes, voice mail Media-based communications, such as multimedia messaging service (MMS) communications Unique identifiers associated with a communication, such as phone numbers, e-mail addresses, and network addresses Media data Audio data, such as music data (artist, genre, track, album, etc.) Visual data, such as any text, images and video data, including Internet data, picture data, podcast data and playlist data Network interaction data, such as click patterns and channel viewing patterns Relationship data User identifying information, such as name, age, gender, race, and social security number Social network data Transactional data Vendors Financial accounts, such as credit cards and banks data Type of merchandise/services purchased Cost of purchases Inventory of purchases Device interaction Any data not captured above data dealing with user interaction of the device, such as patterns of use of the device, applications utilized, and so forth Disambiguation of Non-Unique Usernames and Other Entity Identifiers

One notable aspect of the W4 COMN is the ability to disambiguate non-unique RWE identifiers based on the wealth of data tracked by the system. Disambiguation refers to the act of identifying at least one RWE (and therefore its associated unique RWE identifier and, through extrapolation, any other unique identifiers of the RWE on other communication networks known to the W4 COMN) from a non-unique identifier.

By non-unique identifiers, it is meant identifiers that can be recognized as such but that do not provide sufficient information for the W4 COMN to definitively identify the RWE that the non-unique identifier was intended to identify. Thus, a non-unique identifier should not be confused with an alias or other abstracted identifier. While aliases and other “shortcut” methods for identifying things like phone numbers and email addresses do not themselves contain sufficient information to identify their associated RWE to a network, there is always provided some predefined secondary information that either the computing device or the communication network can use to definitively resolve the alias to a unique identifiers.

For the purposes of this disclosure, non-unique RWE identifiers include strings provided as RWE identification strings for communications that cannot be definitively resolved to a unique identifier based on information known to the communication network. Such RWE identification strings include strings entered into pre-designated identification fields that are incomplete, incorrect, or abstract. One example of such strings includes the sender or recipient fields of electronic mail messages such as “tom3 45@yahoo.com” when the correct address should be “tom345@yahoo.com”; and “tom@yahoo” or “tom” for “tom@yahoo.com”. It is known that these strings are intended to be RWE identifiers but do not contain sufficient information for the addressing component of the implicated communication network (e.g., in the email examples above the Simple Mail Transport Protocol (SMTP) server that must resolve the string into computer address that it can route the message to) to deliver the communication.

Non-unique RWE identifiers also include such things as proper nouns or common nouns associated with or contained in IO data. For example, an IO that is a photograph may contain a caption in its metadata that includes a proper noun such as “Tom and Peggy at the beach”. As another example, an IO that is an electronic message with several attached images may include text with a statement like “Here are the pictures from our climbing trip to the mountain last weekend”. Both the examples above, on their own, do not provide sufficient information for the W4 COMN to definitively identify what RWEs are being referred to. In the first example, absent additional information the text strings “Tom”, “Peggy”, “the beach” cannot be definitively resolved to a unique RWE identifier, much less a unique communication address such as a telephone number or email address for any of the RWEs. In the second example, additional information is needed to identify who is referred to by the word “our” and what location is referred to by the word “mountain”. Such non-unique RWE identifiers may be identified based on their capitalization, contextually (e.g., from its context “to the beach” is likely to refer to a location), grammatically or by other methods.

Disambiguation by the W4 COMN can be considered a type of synchronization that automatically disambiguating the recognition and handling of non-unique usernames and other RWE identifiers by using additional W4 data. The W4 COMN may both disambiguate and alter the categorization of each non-unique username in a personalized graph allowing nearly infinite combinations of identical non-unique identifiers to designate specific RWEs or, in appropriate circumstances, IOs. W4 disambiguation may be used for managing Network or Application process and access requests in a way to allow user-defined non-unique tags to be properly associated within their appropriate context.

W4 disambiguation is appropriate when string analysis cannot determine if tags or other identifiers relate to the same object or when identifiers can not be resolved using normal synchronization methods. In such situations, the W4 correlation engine uses W4 data to model the relationships between the identifier and RWEs and then between the RWEs. The results are then used to determine if they are the same or if they are different.

In an embodiment, disambiguation uses lexical scoping. Lexical scoping is the setting the scope of a variable within a context or sub-context, i.e., what is the value of a given variable within a given range. For example, electronic images may be modeled using the creation time, location image was taken and who the authors of the images are. Using these variables, it is possible to determine that two images taken within the same time, same place and by related users that it is more likely than not that the “Joes” in the images are the same person. And, if the unique identifier is known for Joe in one image, disambiguation can identify the Joe in the other image with the same unique identifier. As another example, disambiguation can identify a user's statement of “my house” and “3254 SW Main St” as the same based upon lexical scoping to likely set of RWEs to which a user is referencing. Contextually scoping using information obtained from all communication channels handled by the W4 COMN allow non-unique identifiers for communication that are scoped by the sender and the receiver of the information.

Implicit query expansion allows any string to be disambiguated to figure out what is meant. For example, if a user types “having a great time at the game,” and then by using the knowledge of the user's relationships, locations and past habits, it can be determined within a high probability who the sender of the message is, where they are, who is with them and what they are doing, how long it will last, etc.

FIG. 7 illustrates some of the elements in a W4 engine adapted to perform W4 disambiguation as described herein. The W4 engine 700 includes a correlation engine 506, an attribution engine 504 and an attention engine 508 as described above. In addition, the W4 engine includes a disambiguation engine 702 that, based on the correlations between IOs and RWEs as described below, identifies which RWE is likely to be associated with any given non-unique RWE identifier. From this information, an appropriate unique RWE identifier can determined and, in turn, one or more unique identifiers for different communications networks can be identified if necessary, such as if the non-unique identifier is an address for the recipient of a communication such as an email message, telephone call, fax message, or even a physical package.

FIG. 8 illustrates an embodiment of a method for disambiguating data on a network using social, temporal, spatial and topical data for RWEs on the network. In the embodiment described below, depending on how the architecture is implemented the operations described may be performed by one or more of the various engines described above. In addition, sub-engines may be created and used to perform specific operations in order to improve the network's performance as necessary.

As described above, a foundational aspect of the W4 COMN that allows disambiguation is the ongoing collection and maintenance of W4 data from the RWEs interacting with the network. In an embodiment, this collection and maintenance is an independent operation 812 of the W4 COMN and thus current W4 social, temporal, spatial and topical data are always available for use in disambiguation. In addition, part of this data collection operation 812 includes the determination of ownership and the association of different RWEs with different IOs as described above. Therefore, each IO is owned/controlled by at least one RWE with a known, unique identifier on the W4 COMN and each IO may have many other associations with other RWEs that are known to the W4 COMN.

In the embodiment shown, the method 800 is initiated when a non-unique identifier is detected in a detection operation 802. The detection operation 802 may include determining that the non-unique identifier cannot be resolved to a unique identifier, for example, as discussed above upon receipt of an address or other string by a communication network that can not be resolved to an RWE (person or device) known to the system. In an alternative embodiment, the detection operation 802 may include detection of any identifier, such as by an analysis of the content (e.g., text, voice, video, etc.) of communications passed through a network, that is recognized as an RWE identifier but that cannot be resolved to a unique RWE identifier. Such detection may occur when a communication is analyzed by an engine or other system used to conduct the communication intake, communication routing or delivery. In yet another embodiment, the detection may occur when a new IO is detected by the system as part of the system's quality control operations. In this embodiment, the method 800 maybe performed in response to the detection of a non-unique identifier in an IO (e.g., draft email, locally stored contact information in an address book, locally stored image or photograph, etc.) that is stored on a remote device on the network.

In response to detecting a non-unique identifier, a data retrieval operation 804 is performed. In the data retrieval operation 804, data associated with the non-unique identifier is retrieved where possible. For example, if the non-unique identifier was in or an address of an IO, the data of the IO itself may also be retrieved. This may include data identifying the source or owner RWE of the IO. Such data may include a unique RWE identifier of the source or owner RWE associated with the IO, either on a particular communication channel or for the W4 COMN or both. If the IO is associated with any other RWEs, e.g., additional recipients of the IO, or RWEs identified by the IO or metadata of the IO, then the unique identifiers associated with those RWEs may also be identified.

This information may then be used to retrieve the W4 data of the RWEs associated with the IO. Such W4 data may include social data, spatial data, temporal data and logical data associated with each RWE. As discussed above, such W4 data may have been collected from communications and IOs obtained by the W4 COMN via many different communication channels and systems.

For example, an email message may be transmitted from a known sender to multiple recipients and the address of one of the recipients may be a non-unique identifier. Because the owner and the other recipients can be resolved to existing RWEs using information known to the email communication network, the unique W4 identifier for those RWEs may be determined Using the unique W4 identifier, then, the W4 COMN can identify and retrieve all W4 data associated with those users, including information obtained from other communication channels. Thus, such W4 data as time and location data obtained from cellular telephone communications for each of the sender and recipient RWEs, social network information for each of the sender and recipient RWEs (e.g., who is listed as friends, co-workers, etc. for each of the sender and recipient RWEs on social network sites), and what topics have been discussed when in previous communications by each of the sender and recipient RWEs.

In addition, the W4 data related to all RWEs known to the system may, in whole or in part, be retrieved. In this embodiment, the non-unique identifier is considered to potentially be associated with any RWE known to the system. If a preliminary filtering is possible, the RWEs for which W4 data are retrieved may be limited based on a preliminary set of factors. For example, if the non-unique identifier is an email address string of “Big Tom” (assuming of course that the sender and/or the system did not already have an alias or other data structure set up for “Big Tom” so that the string could not be resolved), the RWEs for which W4 data are retrieved may be limited to only RWEs having pre-existing email addresses known to the email system. Further limiting may be done by limiting the data retrieval to only those RWEs with some variation of Tom or Thomas in their name. However, in an alternative embodiment, such limiting may not be performed, rather all W4 data for all RWEs may be retrieved.

The method 800 graphs the retrieved W4 data in a graphing operation 806. In the graphing operation 806, correlations are made between each of the RWEs based on the social data, spatial data, temporal data and logical data associated with each RWE. In one sense, the graphing operation 806 may be considered a form of comparing the retrieved social data, spatial data, temporal data and logical data for each RWE with the retrieved data associated with the non-unique identifier and the information contained in the non-unique identifier itself.

Based on the results of the graphing operation 806, a probability for of the RWEs is generated in a probability generation operation 808. In this operation 808, the probability is a value representing the probability that an RWE is the RWE that the non-unique identifier is meant to identify. In an embodiment, for each RWE known to the system a probability may be generated, including a probability for the creator/owner/sender (and additional recipient or other associated RWEs that are known from the context not to be the RWE that was intended to be identified by the non-unique identifier). The probability generated may take into account such W4 information known to the W4 COMN and allows the probability to reflect W4 data received from different communication channels and associated with different RWEs.

In an embodiment, the probability operation 808 takes into account information contained within the non-unique identifier in that the probability generated for each RWE may reflect how close the non-unique identifier is to information known about each RWE. For example, if the non-unique identifier is “Joe”, RWEs that are not associated with “Joe” or “Joseph” or other known equivalents to “Joe” may be given a lower probability than those that match. By association here, it should also be understood that an RWE that is a device, such as a cell phone, may be associated with “Joe” by virtue of it being known to the W4 COMN as the cell phone of a user having a name such as “Joseph Williams”.

In an embodiment, the value of the probability for each of the RWEs is determined in part based on the relationship between an owner or source of the non-unique identifier, such as the sender or creator of an IO addressed to or containing the non-unique identifier. This determination includes determining a relationship between each RWE and the owner/sender/creator RWE based on the retrieved social data, spatial data, temporal data and logical data. This relationship may be implicit and determined as a result of the correlations identified during the graphing operation 806. Alternatively, the relationships may be explicit and simply retrieved as part of the data retrieval operation 804.

The various relationships identified may then be used to generate a probability. In order to obtain more accurate results, different relationships may be assigned different weights when generating a probability. For example, relationships based on spatial and temporal correlations may be assigned a greater relative weight than relationships based solely on social network information. Likewise, relationships based on the relative frequency and topic of communications between two RWEs may be assigned a weight different from that accorded to a explicit designation that two RWEs are family members.

The correlation and comparison process of the generate probability operation 808 does this in part though the W4 COMN's identification of each RWE by a unique identifier and the ability to identify relationships and associations between RWEs. For example, if the non-unique identifier is the name “John Smith” in a new contact IO (i.e., a virtual card or entry in an electronic address book) for a person, the W4 graphing operation 806 may identify the relationships between the creator of the contact IO and any John Smiths or equivalents known to the system. W4 data indicating that the creator of the contact IO has a history of communicating with only one John Smith having a W4 COMN identifier of, say, 4443335555 (determined from the social and interaction data) and a history of being often co-located with the same John Smith (determined using the W4 COMN identifier from comparing past temporal and spatial data from other RWEs, such as a cell phone and previous electronic financial transactions, associated with John Smith), the W4 COMN will determine that there is a high likelihood that the John Smith of the contact IO is the RWE identified by 4443335555 on the network. The likelihood may be represented by a confidence value or probability score for the RWE identified by 4443335555.

The contact IO example above is also a good example of how the graphing operation 806 and probability generation operation 808 may use additional contextual information to identify relationships. For example, the contact IO may indicate that John Smith is employed by a company called “Moon”. Although the non-unique identifier “Moon” may not exactly match any RWEs known to the system, the probability generation operation 808 method may further identify that some John Smith's are related to companies containing the name “Moon” or its derivatives during the graphing operation 806. Each of these relationships may then be weighted and aggregated in some fashion to obtain a final probability for each RWE that takes into account the data of all John Smiths known to the W4 COMN.

In some cases, as part of the generate probability operation 808, W4 data may be identified which are treated as creating a very high likelihood that a non-unique identifier should be associated with a particular RWE. For example, a sender of email may address an email to “Big John” but may not have provided any alias or other direction to the email communication application or system to allow for the non-unique identifier to be resolved to a recipient. However, if the W4 data included one more messages or voice recordings in which the same sender referred to a known RWE as “Big John”, the disambiguation engine would consider this a significant piece of information and generate a probability indicating a very high likelihood or even a certainty that the RWE is to be recipient of the email addressed to “Big John”.

Another example of identifying a very high likelihood from information obtained from different communication channels can be seen in the identification of telephone numbers in email and other text messages. For example, from a text message containing the phrase “John asked you to call him on his cell phone at 720-555-9090”, the graphing operation 806 will attempt to correlate the non-unique identifier “John” with RWEs having the telephone number 720-555-9090. If the W4 data includes an RWE that has such a number and it is related by ownership to another RWE having the name “John Smith”, then the probability generation operation may determine that there is a very high probability that the “John” in the text message is meant to identify the RWE having the name “John Smith”.

The actual values obtained as probabilities by the generation operation 808 may vary depending on the calculations performed. Any suitable method or algorithm for generating a value from different relationships identified in the data may be used. For example, all probabilities may be normalized to some scale or may be aggregated without normalization.

In an embodiment, the W4 data are processed and analyzed using data models that treat data not as abstract signals stored in databases, but rather as IOs that represent RWEs that actually exist, have existed, or will exist in real space, real time, and are real people, objects, places, times, and/or events. As such, the data model for W4 IOs that represent W4 RWEs (Where/When/Who/What) will model not only the signals recorded from the RWEs or about the RWEs, but also represent these RWEs and their interactions in ways that model the affordances and constraints of entities and activities in the physical world. A notable aspect is the modeling of data about RWEs as embodied and situated in real world contexts so that the computation of similarity, clustering, distance, and inference take into account the states and actions of RWEs in the real world and the contexts and patterns of these states and actions.

For example, for temporal data the computation of temporal distance and similarity in a W4 data model cannot merely treat time as a linear function. The temporal distance and similarity between two times is dependent not only on the absolute linear temporal delta between them (e.g., the number of hours between “Tuesday, November 20, 4:00 pm Pacific Time” and “Tuesday, November 20, 7:00 pm Pacific Time”), but even more so is dependent on the context and activities that condition the significance of these times in the physical world and the other W4 RWEs (people, places, objects, and events) etc.) associated with them. For example, in terms of distance and similarity, “Tuesday, November 20, 4:00 pm Pacific Time” and “Tuesday, November 27, 4:00 pm Pacific Time” may be modeled as closer together in a W4 temporal data model than “Tuesday, November 20, 4:00 pm Pacific Time” and “Tuesday, November 20, 7:00 pm Pacific Time” because of the weekly meeting that happens every Tuesday at work at 4:00 pm vs. the dinner at home with family that happens at 7 pm on Tuesdays. Contextual and periodic patterns in time may be important to the modeling of temporal data in a W4 data model.

An even simpler temporal data modeling issue is to model the various periodic patterns of daily life such as day and night (and subperiods within them such as morning, noon, afternoon, evening, etc.) and the distinction between the workweek and the weekend. In addition, salient periods such as seasons of the year and salient events such as holidays also affect the modeling of temporal data to determine similarity and distance. Furthermore, the modeling of temporal data for IOs that represent RWEs should correlate temporal, spatial, and weather data to account for the physical condition of times at different points on the planet. Different latitudes have different amounts of daylight and even are opposite between the northern and southern hemispheres. Similar contextual and structural data modeling issues arise in modeling data from and about the RWEs for people, groups of people, objects, places, and events.

With appropriate data models for IOs that represent data from or about RWEs, a variety of machine learning techniques can be applied to analyze the W4 data. In an embodiment, W4 data may modeled as a “feature vector” in which the vector includes not only raw sensed data from or about W4 RWEs, but also higher order features that account for the contextual and periodic patterns of the states and action of W4 RWEs. Each of these features in the feature vector may have a numeric or symbolic value that can be compared for similarity to other numeric or symbolic values in a feature space. Each feature may also be modeled with an additional value from 0 to 1 (a certainty value) to represent the probability that the feature is true. By modeling W4 data about RWEs in ways that account for the affordances and constraints of their context and patterns in the physical world in features and higher order features with or without certainty values, this data (whether represented in feature vectors or by other data modeling techniques) can then be processed to determine similarity, difference, clustering, hierarchical and graph relationships, as well as inferential relationships among the features and feature vectors.

A wide variety of statistical and machine learning techniques can be applied to W4 data from simple histograms to Sparse Factor Analysis (SFA), Hidden Markov Models (HMMs), Support Vector Machines (SVMs), Bayesian Methods, etc. Such learning algorithms may be populated with data models that contain features and higher order features represent not just the “content” of the signals stored as IOs, e.g., the raw W4 data, but also model the contexts and patterns of the RWEs that exist, have existed, or will exist in the physical world from which these data have been captured.

After the probabilities have been generated from the graphed W4 data, the method 400 then selects one or more RWEs as the most likely to be the RWE that the non-unique identifier was intended to identify in a selection operation 810. Depending on the scope of analyses performed in the probability generation operation 808, the selection may be a simple operation of selecting the RWE with the highest probability.

The selection operation 810 may include comparing the probabilities to a threshold and performing different actions depending on the results of the comparison. For example, in an embodiment two thresholds may be provided. A first threshold (or range of probabilities) may be provided for which, if a probability is found to exceed the threshold, the method considers the associated RWE to be the RWE identified by the non-unique identifier. If an RWE is found to have a probability exceeding this threshold, the method 400 automatically assumes that the non-unique identifier in this particular case identifies the RWE and the non-unique identifier is treated by the system as if it were the unique identifier of the RWE, e.g., the non-unique identifier may be replaced or changed to the appropriate unique identifier of the RWE without any action on a user's part.

A second threshold (or range of probabilities) may be identified by the operators of the W4 COMN for which, based on the algorithm used to generate the probability, for which there is a likelihood that the associated RWE to be the RWE identified by the non-unique identifier, but that likelihood is not so strong as warrant triggering automatic association of the non-unique identifier with the RWE. In such a situation, the W4 COMN may respond by prompting the source of the non-unique identifier with a question such as, “By Big John, do you mean your friend John Smith having an email at . . . ?” If the non-unique identifier was in an address field for a communication, this prompt may be transmitted instead of the error that would normally be sent by the communication channel.

A third range of probabilities may be provided, e.g., probabilities that exceed neither the first nor the second threshold. If the probabilities for all RWEs determined in the generate probability operation 808 fall in this third range, the W4 COMN may do nothing reflecting a condition in which the W4 data contained insufficient information to allow a good correlation to be made. In this case, if the non-unique identifier was in an address field for a communication, the W4 COMN may allow the error that would normally be sent by the communication channel to be sent.

After selection is made, different actions, some of which already described above, may be taken by the W4 COMN. One such actions is the association of a unique identifier with the non-unique identifier. Such an association may be made by replacing non-unique identifier with the unique identifier of the selected RWE. This may include overwriting information in address fields of an IO.

Alternatively, the W4 COMN may add the unique identifier of the selected RWE to the IO containing the non-unique identifier. Continuing an example from above, in the text message containing the phrase “John asked you to call him on his cell phone at 720-555-9090”, the W4 COMN may attach as metadata the unique W4 identifier for the RWE having the name “John Smith”, for the RWE that has the phone number 720-555-9090 (noting that the unique W4 identifier for the cell phone is likely to be different from the actual telephone number), as well as for the RWEs that are the sender and recipient(s) of the message. In an alternative embodiment, the W4 COMN may store information that serves to associate the non-unique identifier “John” with the unique W4 identifier for the RWE having the name “John Smith” in the W4 data backbone.

Thus, one result of the disambiguation method is to create additional information that may then be used in subsequent correlations to better identify relationships between the RWEs. Such information will then be accessible as W4 data in later correlations. In this example, allowing the W4 COMN to easily identify the RWE having the name “John Smith” as being at least the topic of a message between the sender and recipient(s) and, thus, related to the sender and recipient in a manner that will be identified in future graphing operations 806 and taken into account in future probability generation operations 808.

The selections made by the method 800 described above will improve as the richness and amount of data are increased as the system collects more and more data. Furthermore, it should be noted that the method 800 is not an automatic way of creating an alias, but rather a method of dynamically associating non-unique identifiers based on real time information. Thus, what is determined to be the RWE for the non-unique identifier “Big John” in one context will not necessary be the same entity identified in a previous but different context. For example, a particular sender may have two circles of friends, each with it's own “Big John”. In this case, the disambiguation method will be able to identify the correct RWE in each case, even though the sender and non-unique identifier are the same, by mapping the relationships of the different recipients.

FIG. 9 illustrates another embodiment of a method for disambiguating data in an information object using social, temporal, spatial and topical data for RWEs. While FIG. 8 presents disambiguation generally, FIG. 9 specifically describes how W4 spatial and temporal data may be used to identify unknown RWEs referenced in IOs (for example, by non-unique identifiers). Although, the method 900 is described in terms of an IO that is an electronic image of a person at a location, the reader will understand that the operations may apply to any non-unique identifier found in any IO.

The method 900 of FIG. 9 includes an ongoing independent data collection operation 999 as described above with reference to data collection operation 812 of FIG. 8. The method also includes a detection operation 902 in which the W4 COMN detects some reference in an IO to an RWE that cannot be resolved. This reference could be a pronoun or a non-unique identifier of some kind such as a tag or partial name appearing the text or metadata of an IO (e.g., a message with the statement “He will arrive at 10 pm” or an image tagged with “Joe at the beach”). For the purposes of illustration, the method 900 will be discussed in terms of an electronic image showing a person at a beach and further containing metadata (e.g., a title, tag, or comment) that states, “Joe at the beach.” In this example, the disambiguation method 900 is being used to identify the “Joe” in the image from the W4 data and data known about the image itself.

Upon detection of the image and the metadata with the non-unique identifier “Joe”, a W4 data retrieval operation 904 and graphing operation 906 are performed as described in FIG. 8. Furthermore, in addition to the graphical relationships identified by the graphing operation 906, the method 900 of FIG. 9 specifically illustrates an analysis in which a signature for each mobile RWE (as opposed to RWEs that correspond to fixed locations) is generated in a generate signature operation 908.

In the generate signature operation 908, the W4 temporal and spatial data for each mobile RWE is used to create a set of time and location pairs that are considered the temporal and spatial signature for each RWE. A signature may be expressed or represented in many different ways including a simple list of time and location pairs. For example, a small portion of a signature is a list form may contain information such as: Oct. 21, 2006 at 8:42 am—40 degrees, 54.333 min; Oct. 21, 2006 at 9:02 am—40 degrees, 55.400 min; etc. The time may be provided in any standard known, such as coordinated universal time, Greenwich mean time, etc. as long as it can be uniquely resolved by the W4 engine. Likewise, the location may be identified using any known spatial format including GPS coordinates (shown), latitude and longitude coordinates, etc. Furthermore spatial data may include altitude. In an alternative embodiment, the location data may be provided in the form of or include unique W4 identifiers for different locations known to the W4 COMN. For example, a business having the GPS coordinates 40 degrees, 54.333 min may have a unique W4 identifier in which case the spatial data may be the GPS coordinates, the unique W4 identifier of the business or both.

In an alternative embodiment, an RWE's signature may also be determined by graphing all known times against all known location RWEs for the given RWE. If represented visually, this would appear as a two dimensional graph with time along one axis and locations along another, the graph includes points in the graph corresponding time and location pairs that are contained in the W4 data for the given RWE. Thus, the signature generation operation 908 may be considered one facet of a more encompassing graphing operation 906.

Regardless of the forms of the data, the signature is a time and location record associated with an RWE that provides a record of the RWEs movement through space and time based on all the available spatial data stored by the W4 COMN for the RWE. By comparing the signatures of different RWEs, it is then possible to identify historic relationships between RWEs. For example, it could be easily determined that two RWEs were on the same cruise or the same flight from the comparison of their signatures.

In the creation of an RWE's signature, various correlations may be made and data obtained from many different sources in order to provided as detailed a signature as possible. For example, data may be drawn from email records (indicating that a message was transmitted from a specific computing device at a known location and time), cellular phone records (which may contain time and location data for mobile devices), financial transaction data (indicating purchases made at specific locations) and data from sensors (for example, detection of a RFID associated with a vehicle or a transponder).

After signature is created, the IO data is compared to the signature to determine if there is a potential nexus in a comparison operation 910. In an embodiment, the comparison operation 910 includes determining the location of the owner/creator RWE at the time of creation of the electronic image IO. This can be done by retrieving the time of creation of the image from the IO data and extracting the location information for that time from the owner/creator's signature. In an alternative embodiment, the location information may be included as metadata in the image or may be derived from some other data such as the location of an RWE (e.g., cell phone) associated with the creator RWE. This time-location pair is then compared to all of the other signatures in order to determine what RWEs known to the W4 COMN were co-located with the creator RWE at the time of the creation of the IO.

For example, upon determination that the image with the non-unique identifier “Joe” was create on Sep. 23, 2006 by an known owner, the W4 data for that owner and that owner's related RWEs (e.g., devices or other users) may then be used to determine the owner's location at or near the creation time, depending on the W4 data available. The time and location information may then be used to compare it with the signatures of other RWEs, thereby allowing the identification of the RWEs that could be the “Joe” identified in the image's metadata. Note that the “beach” may also be identified in this operation.

In addition, the comparison operation 910 may further include identifying RWEs that are commonly co-located in order to identify additional relationships between RWEs. For example, if a user (based on the user's cell phone location information) is repeatedly found at a certain restaurant, then this information may be used to identify and quantify a relationship between the user and the restaurant.

Based on the results of the comparison operation 910, a probability generation operation 912 is performed. The probability generation operation 912 includes those actions described above with reference to the probability generation operation 808 in FIG. 8 including identifying relationships between RWEs based on the results of the graphing operation 906 and any relationships identified between RWEs and the IO based on the comparison of signatures developed in the signature generation operation 908. The identified relationships are then weighted and combined in order to generate a probability for each RWE as described above.

Continuing the image example from above, the co-location of RWEs with the owner/creator of the image is used as one type of relationship between the RWEs and the image IO. As described above other relationships may also be identified from the graphing and comparison operations, including relationships between the non-unique identifier “Joe” and the RWEs. All of these relationships are then quantified and aggregated for each RWE to determine a value for the relative probability that each RWE is the “Joe” in the image. For example, if the comparison operation 908 determines that three RWEs were co-located with the image creator, the method 900 may then further determined that two of those RWEs are very related based on prior message traffic, telephone calls, and other co-locations resulting in a higher probability for those two RWEs. An additional relationship may then be determined based on a comparison of the non-unique identifier “Joe” with information known about those two RWEs, affecting their probabilities as well. For example, if one of the two is known to the W4 COMN as “William B. Smith” and the other is known to the W4 COMN as “Joseph R. Smith”, then an weighting of the similarity of the non-unique identifier “Joe” to the two RWEs will result in the aggregate probability value for the Joseph R. Smith RWE being greater than that of William B. Smith.

A selection operation 914 is then performed based on the probabilities determined for each RWE such as that described with reference to FIG. 8 above. The selection operation 914 selects an RWE based on the probabilities and then substitutes, appends or otherwise uses the appropriate unique identifier for the RWE instead of the non-unique identifier in order to associated the IO, e.g., the image, with the selected RWE, e.g., “Joseph R. Smith”. Thus, in future analyses by the W4 COMN, the IO will be associated with the selected RWE.

By weighting each of the relationships different, it is possible to place more or less emphasis on different relationships. Such different weighting schemes may be selected based on the situation or type of IO or non-unique identifier being disambiguated. For example, in disambiguating non-unique identifiers associated with an image, time and location information may be weighted more heavily relative to other types of relationships, such as relationships determined from prior message traffic for instance. Likewise, disambiguating non-unique identifiers contained in an email message between two RWEs may place a greater emphasis (by varying the weighting scheme) on the relationships between the topic of the email message and RWEs or on the sender's and recipient's common social network relationships with other RWEs.

Those skilled in the art will recognize that the methods and systems of the present disclosure may be implemented in many manners and as such are not to be limited by the foregoing exemplary embodiments and examples. In other words, functional elements being performed by single or multiple components, in various combinations of hardware and software or firmware, and individual functions, may be distributed among software applications at either the client level or server level or both. In this regard, any number of the features of the different embodiments described herein may be combined into single or multiple embodiments, and alternate embodiments having fewer than, or more than, all of the features described herein are possible. Functionality may also be, in whole or in part, distributed among multiple components, in manners now known or to become known. Thus, myriad software/hardware/firmware combinations are possible in achieving the functions, features, interfaces and preferences described herein. Moreover, the scope of the present disclosure covers conventionally known manners for carrying out the described features and functions and interfaces, as well as those variations and modifications that may be made to the hardware or software or firmware components described herein as would be understood by those skilled in the art now and hereafter.

Furthermore, the embodiments of methods presented and described as flowcharts in this disclosure are provided by way of example in order to provide a more complete understanding of the technology. The disclosed methods are not limited to the operations and logical flow presented herein. Alternative embodiments are contemplated in which the order of the various operations is altered and in which sub-operations described as being part of a larger operation are performed independently.

While various embodiments have been described for purposes of this disclosure, such embodiments should not be deemed to limit the teaching of this disclosure to those embodiments. Various changes and modifications may be made to the elements and operations described above to obtain a result that remains within the scope of the systems and processes described in this disclosure. For example, using speech to text conversion spoken audio communications over communication channels handled by the W4 COMN (e.g., voice communications over a telephone network or audio component of a cable television transmission or other audiovisual stream) allows the non-unique identifiers contained in those communications to be identified. In addition, the selections made in the disambiguation methods described above may be periodically re-evaluated based on current information. This allows a feedback loop to be formed that causes errors in any selections to be found and corrected and also allows selections to be made when sufficient information is becomes available over to time to meet the confidence threshold selected by the W4 COMN operators. Numerous other changes may be made that will readily suggest themselves to those skilled in the art and which are encompassed in the spirit of the invention disclosed and as defined in the appended claims. 

What is claimed is:
 1. A method comprising: determining, via a computing device, that a non-unique username contains insufficient information to identify a first real-world entity (RWE), the non-unique username being associated with an information object (IO) that is associated with the first RWE; retrieving, via the computing device, data associated with the IO; generating, via the computing device, a probability for each of a plurality of RWEs including the first RWE based on the data associated with the JO and data associated with the RWEs; selecting, via the computing device based on the generated probabilities, the first RWE as the RWE identified by the non-unique username; and revising, via the computing device, the data associated with the JO to include a unique identifier associated with the first RWE.
 2. The method of claim 1 further comprising: storing information associating the IO with the first RWE.
 3. The method of claim 1 wherein data associated with the RWE includes at least one of social data, spatial data, temporal data and logical data associated with each RWE and wherein retrieving data associated with the IO comprises: retrieving at least one of social data, spatial data, temporal data and logical data associated with the IO.
 4. The method of claim 3, wherein generating a probability further comprises: comparing the retrieved social data, spatial data, temporal data and logical data for each RWE with the retrieved data for the IO.
 5. A method comprising: retrieving, via a computing device, IO data associated with an information objection (IO), the IO data including at least one of social data, spatial data, temporal data and logical data; retrieving, via the computing device, RWE data for each of a plurality of real world entities (RWEs), the RWE data including at least one of social data, spatial data, temporal data and logical data; comparing, via the computing device, the RWE data and IO data; generating, via the computing device, a probability for each of the plurality of RWEs based on results of the comparing operation; selecting, via the computing device based on the generated probabilities, at least one first RWE as the RWE associated with the IO; and revising, via the computing device, the data associated with the IO to include a unique identifier associated with the at least one first RWE.
 6. A system comprising: a plurality of processors; a correlation engine, implemented by at least one of said plurality of processors, connected via at least one communication network to a plurality of computing devices transmitting information objects (IOs) over the at least one communication network; computer-readable media connected to the correlation engine storing at least one of social data, spatial data, temporal data and logical data associated with a plurality of real-world entities (RWEs); wherein the correlation engine, based on the detection of a first IO containing a non-unique entity identifier, identifies one or more relationships between the first IO and the plurality of RWEs; a disambiguation engine, implemented by at least one of said plurality of processors, that generates a probability for each of the plurality of RWEs based on the identified relationships, selects one of the plurality of RWEs as being identified by the non-unique entity identifier based on the probabilities generated, and associates the first IO with the selected one of the plurality of RWEs via associating a unique network identifier for the selected one of the plurality of RWEs with the first IO; and an attribution engine, implemented by at least one of said plurality of processors, that identifies an owner of the first IO from the data of the first IO, the owner being one of the plurality of RWEs, wherein the disambiguation engine further generates the probability for each of the plurality of RWEs based on relationships between the owner and the other RWEs stored in the computer-readable media.
 7. The system of claim 6, wherein the disambiguation engine further generates the probability for each of the plurality of RWEs based on a comparison of the non-unique entity identifier, data of the first IO and the data stored in the computer-readable media.
 8. The system of claim 6, wherein each relationship is assigned a weight and the probability for each of the plurality of RWEs is generated in part based on the relative weights of the relationships between the owner and the other RWEs stored in the computer-readable media. 